MacDrive includes FREE tech support and some of the fastest response times to phone and email support questions in the industry.Īnd we stand behind our software, if MacDrive doesn’t perform as promised, we offer a 30-day money back guarantee.
And we take the mission seriously. Unlike other software companies, our job doesn’t end when you purchase. Since 1996 we’ve built a reputation on being a rock solid cross-platform utility. Just as important as access your data is protecting it. And in the event that your Mac disks is having a problem, our robust repair feature can fix basic disk issues. From floppies to hard drives, MacDrive can handle almost any disk you toss at it.
MacDrive also includes powerful features that enable you to create and partition Mac disks direct from your PC. There is nothing to launch or learn, MacDrive makes Mac disks look and act just like any other disk on your PC.
Once you plug in your Mac disk, behind the scenes MacDrive works to seamlessly enable Windows understand HFS+ disks and allow you to read and write to the disk. SoftRAID also provides 'predictive disk failure', where users are alerted to potential disk failures. SoftRAID allows the user to create and manage RAID 4 and 5 volumes, RAID 1+0, and RAID 1 (Mirror) and RAID 0 (Stripe) volumes. In the end, if you have a choice, get a lower cache in favor of a higher spin rate.Simple and easy to use, MacDrive is recognized as the leader for accessing Mac disks from Windows for almost 20 years. SoftRAID allows you to create and manage disk arrays to increase performance and reliability. On the other hand, if you, your software, or your (non-existent at the moment) RAID array disables the drive cache, you paid a lot of money for nothing. For example, one can tie chunks together into a mirroring discipline.
The softraid device provides a scaffold to implement more complex I/O transformation disciplines.
If you're particularly IO driven, you'll see an improvement. The softraid device emulates a Host Bus Adapter (HBA) that provides RAID and other I/O related services. SoftRAID's intuitive interface and powerful feature set make this utility a must-have for any OS X Server admin, 'Pro' user, photographer, digital-video editor, or desktop user who wants more reliable backup for his computer. After you add enough spindles, the disk stops being the bottleneck, and it becomes the transit to the array (you're not there yet, don't worry).Įssentially, more cache gives you more wiggle room when it comes to dumping a lot of data on the disk(s). SoftRAID also provides 'predictive disk failure', where users are alerted to potential disk failures even before they fail. So with a RAID system, you have several disks that are being fed, thus increasing the IOPS. At the point the cache fills up, your computer waits on the disk to clear the "dirty" data (data that needs written). If you keep hammering it, it keeps feeding into cache. If you feed the hard drive more data than it can put on a disk, then it uses cache. Each of your disk's spindles has a statistic called IOPS (I/O Operations Per Second - ) that determines how fast it can put bits on the spinning platters. The performance will really depend on the load that you're putting on the disks and where the bottleneck lies. Storing things in memory is really cheap. In other words, actually putting things on disk is expensive, in terms of time. SATA Disks that handle write caching properly?Īnyway, in response to your question.more drive cache gives the drive more space to "play" with. These questions have some interesting reading: I would read Question 9 under "Setup Considerations" in the Software RAID HOWTO: Additional software may be available to do this). There's no NVRAM that keeps the data, and the disks don't keep spinning thanks to a battery backup (on their own, anyway. If the drives have said "ok, we've got the data", and then the power dies while the data is still in cache, there's a problem. Software RAID doesn't really have that sort of option. The battery exists to either write the data to NVRAM, in the event of a controller, or to the physical disks, in the event of a battery-backed array. This causes bad things in software that really needs to know data exists on the disk. Cache helps the performance at the expense of reliability, because if the power dies, your cache goes away, even though the software thought it was safe. The reason is that RAID is typically designed to ensure that your data is safe, and to increase performance. Cache and RAID has an interesting relationship.Įxpensive RAID controllers have built-in cache, and they turn the drive cache off (typically).